The date was March 9, 2009, and the S&P 500 Index was trading at its lowest level since the mid-1990s. The equity market was in literal freefall, and nearly everyone on both Wall Street and Main Street was worried that the U.S. economy -- and the U.S. equity markets -- were about to collapse.

Well, a funny thing happened about midway through that March 9 trading session. People all of the sudden started to get bullish. And during the next 12 months, we witnessed the S&P 500 Index rise nearly 70% off of its lows.

The tremendous bull market recovery during the past 12 months can be seen in dramatic fashion with a quick glance at the one-year chart below of the S&P 500.

As you can see, it’s been nearly a rocket ride higher for much of the past year. Even a sell-off at the beginning of 2010 now has morphed into a near recapturing of the recent 52-week high.

Now, I don’t want to throw water on this market’s flame, but if we widen our perspective a bit when it comes to stocks, we can see that even with the tremendous gains of the past year, holding an S&P 500 index fund over the past five years resulted in essentially flat performance.

The five-year chart above shows just how little progress was made over the last half decade. If you followed a buy-and-hold strategy, you’ve basically been holding onto dead money.

If we widen our lens even further, we can see that if you had been following a buy-and-hold strategy for the past decade, you are in very deep trouble. In fact, over the past 10 years, your S&P 500 holdings would be down nearly 25%!

I think what these three charts make very clear is that the idea of getting rich through simple buy-and-hold investing is flawed -- even with high-performance years like the one we just had.

If you want to get yourself acquainted with a strategy that’s actually bested the buy-and-hold method for more than three decades, then I invite you to check out mySuccessful Investing advisory service. It’s the one strategy proven to get you in the market when the bull stampedes, and keep you out of the market when the bear’s eating Wall Street’s lunch.